In the niche market of rare NES games there exists a holy grail. Nintendo World Championships is the rarest of the rare, a near-impossibility to find in working condition, yet a copy has sprung up on ebay and has sold for almost 100k- perhaps the most ever paid for a single game. At least, it almost sold- the winning bidder pulled out after saying his kid accidentally bid on the game.
As you can tell from the picture, the quality of the game art wasn't an issue. All that matters is that it's an actual working copy of the game, and that was enough to propel it to a winning bid of $99,902, likely the most ever for a NES cartridge. But how could it be? What kind of game could be this rare?
Remember the Fred Savage movie "The Wizard", with the Nintendo competition and the baaaaad Power Glove? In 1990 an actual event, the Nintendo World Championships, sprung up based on that. The competition featured the same cartridge featured in this auction, Nintendo World Championships, a game was actually three games in one (Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris). To win the competition you had to play all three games within a time limit of just over six minutes, with a specific goal in each game.
For Super Mario Bros. the goal is to collect 50 coins as fast as possible; Rad Racer requires you to complete a unique Nintendo World Championships course, and then there's Tetris, which you play until the time limit is reached. They add up all the scores from the three and that was your final score. The winner of the competition won a trophy, $250 and a trip to the World Finals. Finalists got something better than those prizes, though- 116 Nintendo World Championships game cartridges were manufactured to give out to them. 90 of those are the gray cartridges and the other 26 are gold (remember the gold Legend of Zelda cartridge?) and to find a working copy of this nearly 25-year old game is almost impossible.
Due to the nature and history behind Nintendo World Championships it's still arguably the most coveted game for collectors out there, with only one other NES cartridge, Stadium Events, auctioning for around the same prices. That ultra-rare game was recalled from store shelves and destroyed, but not before 200 copies reached consumers. The amount of working copies of that title is a couple dozen at most and it regularly auctions for tens of thousands of dollars.
A lot of people were skeptical that this is the real deal, with reproduction cartridges of Nintendo World Championships popping up now and then. The seller, Muresan, has 100 percent positive feedback from 445 transactions, so he seems like the real deal. He gave a brief history of the owners of the game as he knows it- "An Alt Newsgroups auction was held back in 1998 and purchased by thomaser in Norway. He traded to DreamTR, who sold to me maybe around 2004/05."
But if the 100k winning bid seemed too good to be true, it was. Muresan told Destructoid that the buyer backed out of the purchase. "The unfortunate reality is the second I approached the winning buyer with payment options, they retracted their bid claiming it was a "mistake. I'm not offering the item to other bidders in the auction to see if any of them are honorable individuals. It may take me a while but that's about all I can do for now. It would be nice if eBay were more seller-friendly, rather than 100% buyer protection focused."
Good luck on him for getting it sold in the future to a serious buyer. A seriously rich buyer.
